Welcome to "#SocialStocks," The Fly's weekly recap of Wall Street's reactions to social media stock news.
INSTAGRAM HIDING LIKE IN THE U.S.: On November 10, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said in a Wired interview that Instagram will start hiding likes on the platform for U.S. audiences beginning next week, saying the goal is to"depressurize Instagram, make it less of a competition." Instagram is part of the Facebook (FB) Family of Apps.
FACEBOOK ADDING MEASURES TO PROTECT U.S. 2020 ELECTIONS: On November 7, Facebook's VP of Integrity Guy Rosen said, "We have a responsibility to stop abuse and election interference on our platform. That's why we've made significant investments since 2016 to better identify new threats, close vulnerabilities and reduce the spread of viral misinformation and fake accounts. Today, almost a year out from the 2020 elections in the U.S., we're announcing several new measures to help protect the democratic process... Today, we're launching Facebook Protect to further secure the accounts of elected officials, candidates, their staff and others who may be particularly vulnerable to targeting by hackers and foreign adversaries. As we've seen in past elections, they can be targets of malicious activity. However, because campaigns are generally run for a short period of time, we don't always know who these campaign-affiliated people are, making it harder to help protect them. Beginning today, Page admins can enroll their organization's Facebook and Instagram accounts in Facebook Protect and invite members of their organization to participate in the program as well. Participants will be required to turn on two-factor authentication, and their accounts will be monitored for hacking, such as login attempts from unusual locations or unverified devices... Increasingly, we've seen people failing to disclose the organization behind their Page as a way to make people think that a Page is run independently. To address this, we're adding more information about who is behind a Page, including a new "Organizations That Manage This Page" tab that will feature the Page's "Confirmed Page Owner," including the organization's legal name and verified city, phone number or website... We want to help people better understand the sources of news content they see on Facebook so they can make informed decisions about what they're reading. Next month, we'll begin labeling media outlets that are wholly or partially under the editorial control of their government as state-controlled media. This label will be on both their Page and in our Ad Library... In addition to making Pages more transparent, we're updating the Ad Library, Ad Library Report and Ad Library API to help journalists, lawmakers, researchers and others learn more about the ads they see. This includes: A new US presidential candidate spend tracker, so that people can see how much candidates have spent on ads; Adding additional spend details at the state or regional level to help people analyze advertiser and candidate efforts to reach voters geographically; Making it clear if an ad ran on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger or Audience Network... Over the next month, content across Facebook and Instagram that has been rated false or partly false by a third-party fact-checker will start to be more prominently labeled so that people can better decide for themselves what to read, trust and share. The labels below will be shown on top of false and partly false photos and videos, including on top of Stories content on Instagram, and will link out to the assessment from the fact-checker... Attempts to interfere with or suppress voting undermine our core values as a company, and we work proactively to remove this type of harmful content... In advance of the U.S. 2020 elections, we're implementing additional policies and expanding our technical capabilities on Facebook and Instagram to protect the integrity of the election. Following up on a commitment we made in the civil rights audit report released in June, we have now implemented our policy banning paid advertising that suggests voting is useless or meaningless, or advises people not to vote."
TIK TOK CHALLENGING FACEBOOK FOR ADVERTISERS: On November 13, Adweek's platforms reporter Shoshana Wodinsky wrote that Chinese social media video app TikTok is trying to siphon off some of Facebook's advertisers with targeted marketing campaigns. "TikTok recently began running ad campaigns across Google (GOOG, GOOGL) targeting people curious about Facebook's advertising and influencer business," according to the Adweek story.
Alphabet
+2.08 (+0.16%)
Alphabet
+2.25 (+0.17%)
Ticker changed to META
-1.18 (-0.61%)